Tech's Problem: You Can Only Discover the Law of Gravity Once
Apple is claiming that the Vision Pro, its new VR headset, is a product on par with the iPhone, the iPod and the iPad. It is clearly not, but the fact that they feel compelled to claim it is shows some deep problems in how the tech business works. Namely, for now, they have snatched the low hanging fruit.
The article, while hyping Tim Cook’s comments, also makes it clear that the device is not getting the same traction as iPhones, for example:
The launch was a more subdued affair than the initial rollout of the iPhone and other new devices. When Apple’s phone first went on sale in 2007, customers swarmed stores from New York to San Francisco, desperate to get their hands on one. Friday’s debut drew a relatively small mix of customers either looking to buy the device or just try it out.
Still, Cook compares the Vision Pro debut to the birth of Apple’s other iconic devices, including the Mac, iPod and iPhone, saying it “joins the pantheon of groundbreaking products.”
The relative lack of excitement makes perfect sense. Even if the VisionPro was a flawless product — something the reviews make clear it is not — Virtual Reality headsets are not that useful. Having to manipulate a screen in front of you by hand is not as comfortable as other input methods. Wearing a headset for long periods of time is not comfortable. Many people get nauseous using these devices. More importantly, it does not have an obvious hook for users, outside of maybe games.
The iPhone was a category defining product because it was so obviously helpful. Having a pocket computer in your phone had real benefits that were obvious to users right away. If you remember the original launch of the iPhone, people were clamoring for applications, not just web pages (the device did not have an app store as we understand it today at launch), because they saw the potential clearer than Apple itself did. The iPod was the best MP3 player of the era (excepting the late, lamented Zune) and carrying all your music with you instead of just a handful of CDs was an obvious improvement. Even the iPad was a smaller, lighter laptop replacement for some people. The VisionPro has no such utility.
Meeting wearing a headset is not obviously better than a Zoom call. Watching movies wearing a headset is not an obviously better experience than watching them on a big screen TV. It doesn’t react fast enough to be an augmented reality device — and even if it was, why is having information forced on me all the times superior to getting the same information from my phone when and only when I want it? Outside of games and some remote work potential (and even there, is a floating screen really better than a separate one when doing, say, remote surgery?), there is no obvious way in which this device is superior to existing solutions. But the demands of modern capitalism insist that Apple pretend that there is.
Growth is what Wall Street wants above all else. It is no longer sufficient to just be profitable, you must be more profitable by larger margins in each quarter. In tech, this worked for a while because they were creating new products that solved immediate, obvious problems. Compare the iPhone to crypto, for example. Crypto is a slow database with a lot of problems that make it unusable for many, many situations. But the hype around it pretended that NFTs, for example, were the new way to create art. It was all nonsense, but nonsense that was designed to create a situation similar to the one Apple found itself in in the early 2000s — creating arguably best of breed products that people immediate saw the need for. The VisonPro, in a lot of ways, is Apple’s NFT play.
The problem is that this is not sustainable. Eventually the low hanging fruit is picked, and coming up with compelling products is much harder. I don’t blame companies for trying — everyone wants to invent something that people love. But Apple is a huge company that is likely to be profitable for decades even if it never produces another iPhone level product. But Wall Street will punish them for not producing an iPhone every year, if not every quarter. And so we get overhyped products rushed to market (again, the reviews make it clear that this device needed some seasoning to be up to Apple’s usual hardware standards) that cannot deliver the promised growth. Tech leaders then cut operations and employment in an attempt to make their numbers appear the same as during the heady days of massive growth.
Someone once said that Newton was not only one of the smartest people who ever lived, but one of the luckiest: after all, the fundamental laws of the universe can only be discovered once. Tech companies find themselves in the same place: you can only create a usable pocket computer once. But because of things like stock buy backs and shareholder value being raised above all other concerns, the economy is setup to punish anyone who is merely profitable. Every company must move towards monopoly status if they wish to be rewarded. It is a toxic environment that is ultimately self-defeating. But the system almost guarantees that such self-defeating behaviors will be rewarded.
The VisonPro appears to be a nice product that will likely dominate its niche and increase the profitability of Apple to some small degree. In a sane world, that would be fine. In our modern capitalism, however, that is not nearly sufficient. the bean counter demand constant, over-sized growth. They demand a new law of gravity every quarter, and woe betide anyone who points out that Gravity has already been discovered.